Recently I was editing the hints section of the building Qt statically on Linux page and I learnt a lot of things.

I have raised a question there about whether it is really necessary to separate the install locations of static and shared versions of the Qt library, seeing as the linker has an option -static which forces it to use static libraries when available, thus overriding its behaviour of defaulting to shared libraries when both are found in the library path.

Please elucidate the situation and correct the wiki page also accordingly, providing an answer to my question. Thank you.